by Clive Barker
“What happened to all that talk about being buried in your own country?”
“I’d forgotten how fine it was to be alive. Especially here. There is no finer place in your world or mine than this city. And I want to be the one who heals it, after the cataclysm. I want to be its protector.”
“You want to own it,” Joe said.
“Nobody could ever own b’Kether Sabbat.”
“I think you’re ready to try,” Joe said.
“Well that’s between me and the city, isn’t it?” Noah said, moving to press the blade against Joe’s back. “Go on now,” he said. “Touch the waters for me.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Your body will touch the waters, whether there’s life in it or not.”
“It’s holding the Iad—”
“Very possibly.”
“If we disturb it—”
“The Iad finishes its business here and moves on. It’s going to happen sooner or later. If you make it sooner then you’ve changed the course of history, and maybe got yourself power at the same time. That doesn’t sound so terrible, does it?” He pushed the blade a little harder. “It’s what you came here for, remember?”
Joe remembered. The pain in his balls was a perfect reminder of why he’d made this journey: to never be powerless again. But in the process of coming here—of seeing all that he’d seen, and learning all that he’d learned—the pursuit of power had come to seem like a very petty thing. He’d had love, which was more than most people got in their lives. He’d had physical pleasures. He’d known a woman whose smile made him smile, and whose sighs made him sigh, and whose arms had been an utter comfort to him.
They would not come again, those smiles, those sighs, and it was a worse ache than the sum of his wounds to think of that, but life hadn’t cheated him, had it? He could die, now, and not feel his time had been wasted.
“I don’t . . . want power,” he said to Noah.
“Liar,” said the face in the darkness.
“You can say what you want,” Joe replied. “I know what’s true and that’s all that matters.”
The words seemed to dismay Noah. He made a little moan, and without another word of warning drove his blade into Joe’s gut.
Oh God, but it hurt! Joe let out a sob of pain, which only inspired Noah to press the blade home. Then he twisted it, and pulled it out. Joe entertained no hope of doing his killer damage in return. He’d invited this, after his fashion. He put his hands to the wound, hot blood running through his fingers and slapping on the ground between his legs, then he started to turn his back on Noah. The darkness was becoming piebald; gray blotches appearing at the corners of his sight. But he wanted to look at the ’shu one last time before death took him. Just to meet its golden gaze . . .
He started to turn, pressing both hands against the wound now, to keep his body from emptying. There was still pain, but it was becoming more remote from him with every heartbeat. He had just a little time.
“Hold on . . . ” he murmured to himself.
He had the gaze in the corner of his eye now, and it was vast. A ring of gold and a circle of darkness. Beautiful in its perfection and in its simplicity. Round and round, gleaming gold, uninterrupted, unspoiled, glorious, glorious . . .
He felt something shifting in his head, as though he was slipping towards the golden circle.
Going, going . . .
And oh, it felt fine. He was done with his wounded flesh, done with bruises and bleeding balls; done with Joe.
He felt his body start to fall, and as it did so—as the life went out of it utterly—he fell into the circle of the ’shu’s eye.
He was granted a moment of rest there: but a moment filled with such grace and such ease it wiped all the sufferings of the days that had brought him here, and of the years that had proceeded them.
There was no confusion, nor fear. He understood what had happened to him with absolute clarity. He’d died on the edge of the pool, and his spirit had fallen into the eye of the Zehrapushu.
There, in that gilded round, it stayed for a blissful moment. Then it was gone, up and away along the line of ’shu’s sight towards the cloud of the Iad.
In the temple below him he heard Noah let out a cry of rage, and for an instant, though he had neither eyes nor head to put them in, his spirit saw quite plainly what was happening below. Noah had stepped over Joe’s corpse and had plunged his blood-stained hands into the pool of Quiddity’s waters. The ’shu had responded to the trespass instantly. Its tentacles had started to flail wildly, and one of them—whether by intention or chance Joe would never know—had wrapped around Noah’s arm. Enraged and revolted, Noah picked up the sword he’d just set aside and even as Joe watched he plunged the blade into the ’shu’s unblinking eye.
A tremor passed through Joe’s world. Through the gaze in which he traveled, through the temple below, and out, across the plaza of columns and through the streets of b’Kether Sabbat. He knew on the instant what had happened. The ’shu’s hold on the Iad had slipped; and the great wave that had been frozen over the city began to curl.
Joe turned his spirit-sight up towards the Iad, and to his astonishment saw that he was almost upon it, flying like an arrow into its roiling substance.
Below him, the city shook itself into despair, and the island of Mem-é b’Kether Sabbat fell beneath the Iad’s shadow.
And he, Joe Flicker, who had given up life but had not perished, flew into the heart of the city’s destroyer, and lost himself there as surely as if he had died.
THREE
I
The Sturgis Motel was a modest establishment, set a quarter of a mile back from the road along what was little more than a gravel strewn track, barely wide enough to allow two cars to pass. The motel itself was a single-story, wooden structure built around two and a quarter sides of a parking lot, the quarter being the office, over which a fitfully illuminated sign boasted that there were NO VACANCIES. Apparently most of the occupants were out having a high time in Everville, because when Tesla drove in, the lot was empty but for three vehicles. One was a flatbed truck, parked outside the office, one a beaten up Mustang, which Tesla assumed was Grillo’s, and the third was an even more dilapidated Ford Pinto.
She had not even turned off the engine of her bike when the door of room six opened and a scrawny, balding man in a shirt and pants several sizes too big for him stepped out and said her name. She was about to ask him if they knew each other when she realized it was Grillo. There was no way to conceal her shock. He seemed not to notice, however, or perhaps not to care. He opened his arms to her (so thin! oh, so thin!) and they embraced.
“You don’t know how glad I am to see you,” he said. The frailty wasn’t just in his body. It was in his voice too. He sounded remote, as though his sickness, whatever it was, was already carrying him away.
Both of us, she thought, not long for this world.
“There’s so much to tell you,” Grillo was saying. “But I’ll keep it simple.” He halted, as though waiting for her permission to tell. She told him to go on. “Well . . . Jo-Beth’s behaving really strangely. Some of the time she’s so excitable, I want to gag her. The rest of the time she’s practically catatonic.”
“Does she talk about Tommy-Ray?”
Grillo shook his head. “I’ve tried to make her talk, but she doesn’t trust me. I’m hoping maybe she’ll talk to you, ’cause we need some inside track here or we’re fucked.”
“You’re sure Tommy-Ray’s alive?”
“I don’t know about alive, but I know he’s around.”
“And what about Howie?”
“Not good. We’re all playing some kind of endgame here, Tes. It’s like everything’s coming together, in the worst way.”
“I know that feeling,” she told him.
“And I’m too old for this shit, Tes. Too old and too sick.”
“I can see . . . things aren’t good,” she said to him. “If you want to talk—”
“
No,” he said hurriedly. “I don’t. There’s nothing worth saying anyway. It’s just the way things go.”
“One question?”
“All right. One.”
“Is this why you didn’t want me to come see you?”
Grillo nodded. “Stupid, I know. But I guess we all deal with shit the best way we know how. I decided to hide away and work on the Reef.”
“How’s it going?”
“I want you to see it for yourself, Tes, if we come out of this.” She didn’t tell them she wouldn’t; just nodded. “I think maybe you’d make more sense of it than I have. You know—make the connections better.” He put his arm around her shoulder. “Shall we go in?” he said.
* * *
II
Once, somewhere on the road, Tesla had contemplated setting the story of Jo-Beth McGuire and Howie Katz down for posterity. How in the sunny kingdom of Palomo Grove these two perfect people had met and fallen in love, not realizing that their fathers had sired them to do battle. How their passion had enraged their fathers, and how that rage had erupted into open warfare in the streets of the gilded kingdom. Many had suffered as a consequence. Some had even perished. But by some miracle the lovers had survived their travails intact.
(It was not the first time a story of ill-matched lovers had been told, of course, but more often than not it was the couple who suffered and died, perhaps because people wanted the perfect pair snuffed out before their love could lose its perfection. Better a murdered ideal, which at least kept hope alive, than one that withered with time.)
While making her notes for this story Tesla had several times wondered what happened to the golden lovers of Palomo Grove. Here, in room six, she had her answer.
Despite the warning Grillo had given, she was not prepared to find the couple so changed: both gray-faced, their speech and action devoid of any spark of vitality. When, after some wan greetings had been exchanged, Howie began to describe for Tesla the events that had brought them to this sorry place and condition, the pair scarcely glanced at each other.
“Just help me kill the sonofabitch,” Howie said to Tesla, the subject of the Death-Boy’s dispatch rousing a passion in him absent until now. She told him she didn’t have any answers. Perhaps the Nuncio had bestowed some form of invulnerability upon him (after all, he’d escaped the conflagration in the Loop).
“You think he’s beyond death, right?” Grillo said.
“It’s possible, yes—”
“And that’s from the Nuncio?”
“I don’t know,” Tesla said, staring down at her palms. “I have a taste of the Nuncio myself, and I’m damn sure I’m still mortal.”
When she looked up at Grillo again, she saw such despair in his eyes she could only hold his gaze for a moment before looking away.
It was Jo-Beth, who had added little to the exchange so far, who broke the silence. “I want you to stop talking about him now,” she said.
Howie threw his wife a sour, sideways glance. “We’re not done yet,” he said.
“Well, I am,” Jo-Beth said a little more forcibly, and crossing to the bed she picked up the baby and headed for the door.
“Where are you going?” Howie said to her.
“I’m going to get some air.”
“Not with the baby you’re not.”
There was a litany of suspicions in these few words.
“I’m not going far—”
“You’re not going a-a-a-anywhere!” Howie shouted. “Now put Amy back on the bed and sit down!”
Before this escalated any further, Grillo stood up, “We all need some food in our stomachs,” he said. “Why don’t we go get some pizza?”
“You go,” Jo-Beth said. “I’ll be fine here.”
“Better still,” Tesla said to Grillo, “you and Howie go. Let me and Jo-Beth sit and talk for a few minutes.”
There was some debate about this, but not much. Both men seemed relieved to have a chance to escape the confines of the motel for a few minutes, and from Tesla’s point of view it offered an opportunity to speak to Jo-Beth alone.
“You don’t seem very afraid that Tommy-Ray’s coming to find you,” she said to Jo-Beth when the men had left.
The girl looked across at the baby on the bed. “No,” she said, her voice as pale as her face. “Why should I be?”
“Well . . . because of what might have happened to him since you saw him last,” Tesla replied, trying to put her point as delicately as possible. “He’s not the brother you had in Palomo Grove.”
“I know that,” Jo-Beth said with a tinge of contempt in her voice. “He’s killed some people. And he’s not sorry. But . . . he’s never hurt me. He wouldn’t ever do that.”
“He might not know his own mind,” Tesla replied. “He might hurt you, or the baby, without being able to help himself.”
Jo-Beth simply shook her head. “He loves me,” she said.
“That was a long time ago. People change. And Tommy-Ray’s changed more than most.”
“I know,” Jo-Beth replied. Tesla didn’t reply. She just waited in silence, hoping that Jo-Beth would talk about the Death-Boy a little. After a few moments, she did just that. “He’s been all over,” she said, “seeing the world . . . now he’s getting tired—”
“He told you that?”
She nodded. “He wants to be quiet for a little while. . . . He says he’s seen some things that he needs to think over—”
“Did he say what?”
“Just things,” she said. “He’s been traveling around, working for a friend of his.”
Tesla hazarded a guess. “Kissoon?” she said.
Jo-Beth actually smiled. “Yeah. How’d you know?”
“It’s not important.”
Jo-Beth raked her fingers through her long-unwashed hair, and said again, “He loves me.”
“So does Howie,” Tesla pointed out.
“Howie belongs to Fletcher,” Jo-Beth said.
“Nobody belongs to anybody,” Tesla replied.
Jo-Beth looked at her, saying nothing. But the look of utter abjection in her eyes was chilling.
Would nothing be saved? Tesla thought. There was Grillo, playing his endgame, thinking of the Nuncio as some last reprieve (but not truly believing it); D’Amour climbing the mountain to spend his last hours where the crosses stood; and this poor girl, who had been so blithe and so effortlessly beautiful, ready to be taken by the Death-Boy because love had failed to save her.
The world was turning off its lights, one by one. . . .
A gust of wind shook the windowpane. Jo-Beth, who had turned from Tesla to tend to the baby, looked round.
“What is it?” Tesla said softly.
There was another gust now, this time at the door, as though the wind was systematically looking for some way in.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” Tesla said. The girl’s eyes were glued to the door. “Jo-Beth, you have to help me here—” Tesla crossed to the door as she spoke, and gingerly turned the key in the lock. It was a pitiful defense, she knew (this was a force that brought down houses), but it might earn them a second or two’s grace, and that might be the difference between saving a life or losing it. “Tommy-Ray’s not going to solve anything,” Tesla said. “You understand me? He’s not.”
Jo-Beth was bending to pick up little Amy. “He’s all we’ve got,” she said.
The wind was rattling both the window and the door now. Tesla could smell it as it gusted through the keyhole and the cracks. Death was here, no doubt of that.
Amy had begun to sob quietly in her mother’s arms. Tesla glanced down at the child’s tiny, knotted face, and thought of what such innocence might rouse in the Death-Boy. He’d probably be proud of infanticide.
The floor was shaking so hard the key was rattled from its slot. And somewhere in the gusts there were voices, or the fragments of same, some speaking in Spanish, some, Tesla thought, in Russian, one of them nearly hysterical, one of them sobbing. She caught only a smatte
ring of their words, but the gist of it was plain enough. Come outside, they were saying. He’s waiting for you . . .
“Doesn’t sound all that inviting,” Tesla whispered to Jo-Beth.
The girl said nothing. She just stared at the door, gently rocking the troubled baby, while the voices of dead pined and moaned and muttered on. Tesla let them speak for themselves. To judge by the look on Jo-Beth’s face they were doing a far better job of dissuading her from stepping over the threshold than Tesla could have done.
“Where’s Tommy-Ray?” Jo-Beth said at last.
“Maybe he didn’t come,” Tesla replied. “Do you . . . maybe want to slip out the bathroom window?”
Jo-Beth listened for a few seconds longer. Then she nodded.
“Good,” Tesla said. “Make it fast. I’ll keep them busy.”
She watched Jo-Beth retreat to the bathroom, then she turned and went to the door. The ghosts on the other side seemed to sense her approach, because their voices dropped to a murmur.
“Where’s Tommy-Ray?” Tesla said.
There was no coherent response, just more distressing din, and a further rattling of the door. Tesla glanced over her shoulder. Jo-Beth and Amy were out of sight, which was something. At least now if the ghosts tried to break in—
“Open . . . ” they were murmuring, “open . . . open,” and while they murmured they escalated their assault on the door. The wood around the hinges began to splinter, and around the lock too.
“It’s okay,” Tesla said, fearful that their frustration would make them more dangerous than ever. “I’ll unlock the door. Just give me a moment.” She stopped and picked up the key, slid it into the lock, and turned it. Hearing this, the ghosts were quieted, the gusts hushed.
Tesla took a deep breath and opened the door. The cloud of phantoms retreated from her in a dusty wave. She looked for Tommy-Ray. There was no sign of him. Closing the door after her, she walked out into the middle of the lot. She’d written an execution scene in one of her failed opuses—a terrible screenplay called As I Live and Breathe. This walk put her in mind of it. All that was missing was the warden and the priest.